The Ten Best Summer Steelhead Flies!!!

Disclaimer: I wrote this as a joke, because I have no idea what the ten best steelhead flies might be, winter or summer, and I feel guilty every time somebody ends up here. It’s actually a long shaggy dog story about a fly I tied with an ostrich feather that a drag queen gave me at a pride day parade. I did, in fact, catch a summer steelhead on that fly, so if you want to know the very best steelhead fly, it’s one you tie with a feather given to you by a drag queen at a pride parade.

I’m sure someone knows what the ten best summer steelhead flies are, but I haven’t a clue. In September We  go to Oregon, but before, in less than a week, we go to Louisiana. The jumble has me thinking about redfish and steelhead flies at the same time, and I’m no good at multitasking.

I like simple flies. A few years ago the rage in redfish flies was redfish crack, the hardest part of which was using a magic marker.  Tie some EP fiber to the hook for a tail, wrap some EP brush for a head, use a sharpie to bar the tail, brush out the head, done. I greatly admire that fly.

My current favorite redfish fly is this unnamed thing, or at least unnamed to me. It’s my favorite because I made it up after fishing an Avalon for permit, and because the first fly I ever fished in saltwater, a rattler, had rattles. I later caught 50-odd crappie in a single day with a rattler, and later still caught a four-pound bass. I like flies that make noise. I would name the fly I made up, but I figure lots of people have made up the same fly, and one of these days I’ll stumble across its name.  Meantime it’s easy to tie and catches all sorts of stuff. Plus it’s kinda weedless, or as much as any fly is ever weedless.

Rattler. Ok, maybe it was only 30 crappie. CRAH-pee. Puh-CAHN.

Sac-au-lait.

Steelhead flies though are a different matter. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever thought about making them simple, and I don’t know why.  Are steelhead peculiarly complex? Do they never hit a Clouser? Steelhead flies look like somebody wanted to tie classic salmon flies, smoked a joint, and came up with Modern Steelhead Flies. That’s the book I bought to teach me all about steelhead flies, Modern Steelhead Flies.

It’s hard, by the way, not to make jokes about marijuana and Oregon.

Kris and I finally paraded with my firm in this year’s LGBT Pride Parade, and I learned that sometimes Texas parade routes smell like marijuana. Colleagues ask every year if I’ll march and I say sure but then something happens. I put off joining the parade for two years, and they finally shamed me into it. Personally I think it’s a better world when LGBT folk can do some shaming.

The Pride Parade in Houston is no small affair.  There are thousands of paraders, and tens of thousands of paradees. Our daughter dropped us off on Allen Parkway and we walked a bit to the staging point. I really dressed for the parade too: a pair of running shoes, khaki shorts, blue linen shirt, and the crowning glory, my straw fedora. I was a little worried I might stand out too much, but believe it or not, some participants were even less restrained than me. Really. Kris said there was a topless lady, but I didn’t see her. Ogling the topless lady would have probably been wrong anyway, but Kris thought she might be topless at a parade with some expectation of being ogled. Could be.

There were groups from churches and big oil. There was the mayor and the parents of transgender children. There were Democratic candidates, though I think I must have missed the Republican float. We were the only big law firm, but there were lots of banks, and some smaller firms.

So meantime I haven’t actually read much of Modern Steelhead Flies, but it’s got good pictures. Of course I had absolutely none of the fly tying materials for steelhead flies. This is always a given for any new fly, one never has the stuff. This though was particularly brutal. Hooks? Nope. Hot pinks and purples and blues? Nope? Ice dubbing? Not a bit of it. I didn’t own a single ostrich feather.  The first fly I tried, something called a Fifth Element because of all the blue feathers (none of which I owned), had 72 different layers of materials. I spent an hour ordering from FeatherCraft, and when they didn’t have everything I ordered some more from J. Stockard. None of my local shops were going to carry this stuff. I finally found blue Gamakatsu octopus hooks on Amazon. The Feather Thief got nothing on me.

Then I tied the fly, got to the end and realized I’d  forgotten to order the last five layers of stuff.  I tied in some black marabou and called it a day. It looked pretty good, too, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the big gaps on the back side where I didn’t get the materials all the way around the hook.

The third fly in the book, which was also on the list of flies the Oregon outfitter sent, was Jeff Hickman’s fish taco.

Now Mr. Hickman’s fish taco really appealed to me. It was on the outfitter’s list. It was relatively simple compared to the other stuff, only 67 layers or so. Most of all I could look at the fly and think, that looks fishy. That’s the highest praise for any random fly sitting in a box: It looks fishy. Plus it was a taco. I might prefer an enchilada, or even a chalupa, but I’m a Texan and if what you can get is a taco you take a taco. I know and like people who’ve written admirable books about queso and salsa, and I’ll throw in a gratuitous plug for them here. I have also gone miles out of my way to get barbacoa and lengua tacos with just a brush of onion and cilantro, and this was a taco.

I was sitting in my office one day and got distracted and watched a video of Jeff Hickman tying Jeff Hickman’s fish taco. He seemed like a genuinely reasonable guy. He drank unpretentious beer. He took it in stride when he forgot to tie in the 33rd layer of rainbow black flashabou.  I figured this was a guy who wouldn’t mind if I had to use a hot pink hot spot instead of red because I only ordered hot pink ice dubbing.

I also had no ostrich feathers, and 90% of the fish taco is ostrich feathers.

So Kris and I are walking to the staging point for our LGBT Pride parade group and I’m dressed in my gaudy outfit and I feel a hand on my shoulder. A big hand.

Now I’m 6 feet, or I was 40 years ago, but I turn and look up, way up, into the face of either a transgender lady or a drag queen–the taxonomy confuses me some but you can be one without being the other, or vice versa–in a long black satin sheath gown and enough dyed black ostrich feathers to festoon, well, an ostrich. We were of a certain age together, but she’d spent a bit more time in tanning beds, and I was dressed more like a law firm partner taking his grandkids to the zoo. I had no ostrich feathers.

“Darlin’, we gotta spruce you up.” Ok, maybe that wasn’t precisely what she said, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  She plucked an ostrich feather and stuck it in my hat and declared me more festive. I now have a spirit animal for this trip to Oregon, but I haven’t decided whether it’s an ostrich or a 6-foot-4 drag queen in the LGBT Pride parade. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So meantimes.

Kris and I are driving from Galveston and talking about what we need to take to Oregon and she says she’s been looking at the email from Jeff Hickman and I say who? She says Jeff Hickman and I say the fish taco guy? She says what? Jeff Hickman it turns out is our outfitter. I guess I knew that, we’d exchanged emails and all, but it hadn’t registered that the guy I was watching on YouTube tying fish tacos was the guy I was e-mailing. I’m slow like that.

But I catch up sooner or later and this is all coming together. I might even catch a fish. I’ll tie up some hot pink redfish crack with lavender hot spots. If nothing else I’ll learn to tie a fish taco, and I’ll use ostrich herl scavenged from the wild.

Oregon and the Color of Fish

In September, after Louisiana and a quick-trip again to try for Maryland stripers, we go to Oregon to fish for steelhead on the Deschutes. We have a bit more than a month between Louisiana and Oregon, and I’ve decided there are no two places in this country further apart, if not quite physically then in most other ways that matter. Even the Oregon names, Oregon, Portland, Deschutes, ring different than Louisiana names: Louisiana, Vieux Carre, Atchafalaya.

Eugene. Acadiana.

The Deschutes is a lovely river, I’ve seen it. But its name calls out for a gesundheit.  It’s not just the brutality of the names though that make Oregon different from  Louisiana. Oregon is liberal, eccentric, and whatever its history may be it seems to have no great effect on its present.  Louisiana is none of those things, except of course for eccentric. In Oregon you can legally smoke pot and legally commit suicide. In Oregon you drink pinot noir or pinot gris and craft beer, or maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon. In Louisiana you try to drink yourself to death with drive-through daiquiris and sticky sweet hurricanes in to-go cups from Pat O’Brien’s and complex mildly bitter Sazeracs. Interestingly, based on CDC data, Louisiana ranks only 17th among states for rates of heavy drinking among adults, Oregon unexpectedly ranks higher than Louisiana at 16th. I suspect all those tea-totalin’ Baptists in north Louisiana keep it from achieving its proper place as number one, and all those winery owners boost Oregon.

Maybe I’m wrong and they’re not really different. Maybe we’ve all blended into the same thing. But can you imagine if Duck Dynasty had been made in Oregon? It would be Portlandia. And vice versa.

Evermann, Barton Warren  and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska, , 1907, plate 38, Steelhead Trout

On driving trips we used to play a game naming the natural color of cars. The natural color of a car is the color of the wild car before its domestication.  The natural color of a 1980s Ford Crown Vic is brown. The natural color of a BMW five series is blue, a Honda Accord is silver, and a 1970s F-150 pickup is red.  It’s a fun game, because there are so many cars where the answer strikes everyone playing as obvious.

We picked the Deschutes for steelhead because it’s the natural color of Oregon fish. What else could we fish for? Where else could we fish? Some states don’t have a natural color of fish: Florida and Alaska have too many colors to pick just one.  Texas doesn’t really have a natural color of fish, unless it’s channel cat and they’re hard to get to take a fly. I’ve fished in Oregon before, for trout on the McKenzie out of a McKenzie boat, and even though we caught fish it was somehow unsatisfactory. I think it was unsatisfactory because we fished the wrong color of fish. In Maryland you gotta fish stripers in the Chesapeake. In Louisiana you gotta fish redfish in the coastal marsh. In Oregon you gotta fish for chromers–I think that’s what they call them –on the Deschutes. Everywhere else a chromer is a stocked trout. In Oregon it seems to be the wildest of trout.

I suspect in Oregon the natural color of fish is steelhead, not because there aren’t other perfectly good targets.  There are plenty of perfectly decent rivers in Oregon and miles of coastline, but I suspect it’s steelhead because in Oregon steelheading is at least in part about the style of the thing. Could you fox hunt without red jackets and stirrup cups? I reckon, but it ain’t quite the thing.  It ain’t quite the thing to fish for steelhead out of a drift boat with a 9 ft 7 wt and nymphs under a bobber, even though that apparently is the best way to actually catch steelhead. It’s just not done. You have to cast gaudy flies with a 13 foot spey rod that’s good for not much else. You have to use impossibly named incomprehensible line and leader combinations. It’s not just a thing to be done, it’s a thing to be done in the right way.

It seems to me that spey casting is popular in Oregon not because it’s the best way to catch fish but because it’s fun to do in and of itself, and even more fun to do in and of itself while mildly stoned. This is what happens to a perfectly good sport when you legalize marijuana.

There is certainly fly fishing in Louisiana, but talk to most of the Louisiana fly guides and you begin to suspect that there’s not much purity in the heartland of the spoon fly. “I was after a record fish, so I had five rods set up and I’d hook one fish and if it didn’t seem big enough I’d hand it off to  the guide and he’d bring it in while I took one of the other rods to cast again.”  I heard someone say that about fishing to a school of bull reds in the Louisiana marsh. In Oregon the discussion seems to be about how many days one casts from dawn to dusk before one actually catches a fish. They don’t actually wear red jackets though. At least I hope so.  I don’t own a red jacket.

Meanwhile we keep trying to fish Galveston. Kris caught a bit of redfish Saturday morning blind-casting in Green Lake mud.  I put down some tailing redfish.  I’d forgotten how skittish redfish could be on a flat on a still summer day.

That’s Kris’s fish. I only photobombed.

Girdle Bugs

I tried to fish for trout on the Guadalupe Sunday without a split shot, and ran into two problems.  The flow is so slow, and the river is so shallow, that the weight of my attractor–a girdle bug tied on a muddler hook–was still causing too many hangups in the rocks.  I had wrapped them 10 times or so with .025 wire.  I re-tied this week with .015.

It raised a problem for me, how do I tell last week’s girdle bugs, which would be just fine in heavier water, from this week’s girdle bugs?  I searched the internet, where writers suggested you should organize your fly boxes by weight.  Fat chance that.  My fly boxes are filled with good intent, but this week’s organization is largely chaos by the next time I go fishing.  I do manage to keep nymphs in one box, streamers in one, dries in a third, and little tiny things I can’t see anymore in a fourth.  And I like the notion of loading what I actually plan to fish in still another box.  I tied this week’s girdle bugs in brown, which contrasts from the prior week’s black.  Of course that means this week I have no black girdle bugs to fish.

I also had some 5x Umpqua tippet that was rotten.  How old was it? No clue, but it couldn’t have more than a decade. I guess after a few decades none of us are what we were.